Latent hidden stations are stations sensing differently from each other, and are common in wireless networks with carrier sense access and relatively large coverage area. In practical application, in some transfer strategies, conflicts arise when stations latent hidden to each other initiate data transmission simultaneously, leading to a case that after respective stations finish data transmission, there is no expected response, and the respective stations back-off for a random period and once again compete for data transmission; while in some other transfer strategies, no conflicts arise when stations latent hidden to each other initiate data transmission simultaneously, and utilization of the network resource may be improved, for example, Multiuser Multiple-Input Multiple-Out-Put (MU MIMO) transmission strategy is suitable for the case that stations latent hidden to each other initiate data transmission simultaneously.
Currently, the issue of latent hidden stations is solved through the following way:
the station sends a short frame to an access point (AP) before sending data, to sound out whether the channel is idle, and at the same time sets a network allocation vector (NAV) for other stations on the largest scale through the short frame;
the station receives from the AP a frame in response to the short frame, and determines that at this moment the channel is idle and channel reservation succeeds; and during this period stations latent hidden to the station can not send data to the AP; and
the station sends data to the AP.
In the above technical solution, advantages of the AP in the process of data transmission are not effectively used, and it is required to send the short frame every time before sending data, thus additional overhead is caused.